These are extraordinary times. They are unquestionably one of the crucial turning-points in world history. The future will probably show that they are even the most important of all that mankind has lived through so far.

It is only natural that, at times like these, as at all other major turns in history, thinkers ponder on the substance of history.

Let us recall antiquity, the time of Polybius and Ssu-ma Ch’ien. They belonged to different worlds—one to the Western, and the other to the Eastern. Generally speaking, the situation in these two parts of the inhabited world was historically similar. Polybius (203-120 B. C.) lived in the Hellenistic epoch, that period of it when the Roman Empire was emerging in the Mediterranean basin as the unifier and hegemon of a spacious world reaching from the British Isles to Bactria in Central Asia. Ssu-ma Ch’ien (14585 B. C.) lived in the Han Empire, which incorporated the kingdoms of what is now China and ruled supreme over a vast area stretching from the Japanese islands to present-day Hsin-chiang and Central Asia, known in China at that time as the “Western end”.

Socio-economically, the time of Polybius and Ssn-ma Ch’ien had been the final stage of the long and changeful history of the slave-owning society that existed in those two regions of the ancient civilised world.

It was a time of turbulent events, a crucible for many peoples, but it produced great treasures of culture and roused man’s craving to cognise and understand the developments about him. It was this craving which brought forth the works of Polybius and Ssu-ma Ch’ien.

The two historians appraised the emergence of their respective empires as a fact of world-wide historic —and, moreover, beneficial — purport. For them, it was an ascent to the summit.

Another striking attempt to comprehend the course of history was made on the threshold of the Middle Ages, a time of transition

from slave society to feudalism. In the East, the attempt was made by Nagarjuna (2nd-3rd centuries), and in the West, by Aurelius Augustinus (354-430).

Nagarjuna based his views, which he set out in a number of treatises and notably in his Mahaprajnaparamita-sutra, on the principles defined in Saddharmapundarica-sutra (1st century A. D.), the Lotus Sutra. The principles of the Lotus Sutra were built upon the conceptions of Mahayana, the “Great Vehicle”, imbued with a distinctly universalist idea, the idea that enabled Buddhism to overcome local Indian exclusiveness and reach out to the ends of the Eastern world—first to those lands of the Middle East that adjoin India and then also to the boundless expanses of Central and Eastern Asia. This transformed Buddhism, a faith conceived in the womb of slave-owning society, into a religious system destined to serve the then new and burgeoning feudal society.

The teaching of Aurelius Augustinus, set out in his De Civitate Dei (413-426), belongs to Christianity, another religion conceived in slave-owning society; it was moulded in the late Hellenistic period and reflected the universalism that constituted one of the principal features of the Hellenistic mentality.

Nagarjuna and Aurelius Augustinus felt that a new time had arrived in man’s history which each described in his own way as man’s ascent to the summit. They conceived this summit as man’s ultimate salvation by a divine power—Buddha in the former’s case, and Christ in the latter’s. Both dealt in religious categories, for to men conscious of progress these represented the most universal and all-embracing ideas of the time. The conception of ascent was based on the audaciously proclaimed idea of the unity of samsara and nirvana, the earthly and the divine, the empirical and the absolute, propounded by both Buddhism and Christianity. It enabled both faiths to invade the real world and take a hand in mundane affairs.

We also find a remarkably lucid appreciation of the current historical time—and again in the context of man’s general history—■ during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Not at all surprisingly, it was more distinct and lucid in Europe, the Western world, where this transition was at its most tangible. In the East, the emergence of elements of capitalism—though they appeared earlier there (in, say, China), proceeded far more slowly and less acutely for definite historical reasons. This is why the conception of history set out in his Scienza nuova by Giovanni Battista Vico (16681744) is so important to us in relation to that specific period of world history.

Vico’s conception of history is usually described as the theory of recurring cycles. He held that history was cyclical and every cycle consisted of three stages—the epoch of barbarity, the age of heroes and the age of humanity. The age of humanity, Vico maintained, was the peak of every cycle, followed by descent to a new epoch of

barbarity. According to Vico, each recurring cycle saw man descend to a lower degree of barbarity than in the one before it and, accordingly, each recurring ascent saw him rise to a higher, as yet unsealed, summit. The march of history, Vico believed, was not circular, but spiral-like, meaning that history did not just repeat itself, albeit in different forms, but essentially constituted a process of advance.

However, it is not this aspect of Vico’s doctrine, but bis attitude toAvards his epoch that interests us most. He considered the “age of humanity” an age of the city, of law and reason. That Avas how he visualised his OAvn epoch. The epoch he lived in was to him the beginning of the age of humanity and, hence, an era of ascent.

The fact that Vico used the expression “age of humanity” indicates that he thought in terms of humanistic philosophy, as mundane a system as was possible at the time.

The craving to comprehend current history was bound to appear also during the next sharp turn—the time of the transition from capitalism to socialism. Indeed, it did appear. It appeared Avhere the transition occurred most tangibly, at a time when it Avas most distinct—in the West, in Europe, in the 20th century. OsAAald Spen-gler’s The Decline of the West (1918-1922) and Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934-1954) Avere evidence of this effort to comprehend history. Spengler Avrote his book soon after the First World War and the Socialist Revolution in Russia, and Toynbee tackled his voluminous work before the Second World War and completed it after the People’s Revolution in China.

Both these studies are widely-known and there is scarcely any need here to set out the conceptions of their authors. We only Avisii to draw attention to Avhat is in a way the keynote of the tAvo investigations: their tenor is entirely different to those of all the aforementioned forerunners of the two contemporary thinkers.

Polybius and Ssu-ma Ch’ien extolled their time. Whatever their view of the general process of man’s history, they considered their own time an era of ascent. The concepts of Nagarjuna and Aurelius Augustinus were imbued with deep faith in the “ultimate salvation” of long-suffering humanity, that is, with deep-seated optimism. Vico believed that the “age of humanity” Avould be followed by an “epoch of barbarity”, but that was his general, that is to say, theoretical, outlook. In the practical sense, he thought his OAvn time a time of ascent. In other Avords, he cogitated optimistically in the context of his contemporary history. The tAvo latest exponents of the philosophy of history had an entirely different attitude toAvards their times. It Avas a pessimistic attitude, wholly so in Spengler’s case and Avith some reservations in Toynbee’s.

There is little need to delve at any length into the differences that mark the historical mood of Polybius, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Nagarjuna, Aurelius Augustinus and Vico, on the one hand, and Spengler and Toynbee, on the other. The former speculated in terms of

ascent, while the latter thought in terms of the receding element. The conceptions of Spengler and Toynbee should probably be viewed in the context of their eschatological state of mind, a state that gripped so many people at times of acute historical collisions and was strikingly reflected in a number of remarkable works, most notably in St. John’s Apocalypse. In our time, too, we know, the acuteness of the historic moment is liable to create such eschatological sentiment. That is easy enough to understand, but not to share. What is needed is a closer look at history, at the path travelled by mankind up to the present hour.

Need we say that our appreciation of the past depends on the amount and level of our knowledge? Yet this knowledge is always relative, always historical. All we can say in this, the second, decade of the latter half of the 20th century is that our knowledge of past history ranges far afield and is much greater than the knowledge that existed in the latter half of the 19th century. To think it will not be still greater in future is to assume the retrogression of the human race. We see clearly how our knowledge of the past gradually expanded, how new elements were injected into it by new discoveries, and how often these made us modify what were seemingly deep-rooted conceptions. Many fresh discoveries still lie ahead.

Assuming, however, that we know enough in basic outline about the past of mankind and that the new element likely to he injected into our knowledge of history will affect no more than particular aspects of man’s past, our knowledge of the process of history will still necessarily be hemmed in by the limitations of time. All interpretation of human history necessarily stems from what we are able to deduce from man’s previous experience, what we are able to foresee of the future on the basis of this experience.

To be sure, our experience is fairly prodigious. Even if we begin our review of history from the time of the emergence of the earliest tokens of statehood—which will take us back to the 4th millennium B. C.—we shall be dealing with man’s life over as many as 60 centuries. These six millenniums are bound to reveal the general outline of the path travelled by mankind. They are bound to reveal the purport of this path, and its general direction.

To top it, there is yet another factor which makes our appreciation of material limited in time fuller and more distinct, and, moreover, applicable to the future or, at the very least, the near future. This factor may be described as our own historical experience, the experience of the contemporary times.

There are times in the history of man that connote the end of something significant and, what is more, the beginning of something new. There are times that, as it were, lift the veil on the future. These times are best described as revolutionary turns.

The first such turn was the collapse of the world we style as ancient society. In socio-economic terms it was, generally speaking, a slave-owning society. There came a day when it collapsed as the dominant world system. The last of its major exponents was the

Han Empire in Eastern Asia and the Roman Empire in Southern Europe, North Africa and Western Asia. The Han Empire fell in the 2nd and 3rd centuries A. D., and the Roman, in the 4th and 5th centuries. These developments shed light on the past and lifted the veil on the future. The collapse of the two empires indicated clearly that the socio-economic relations that burgeoned when these empires still existed, were emerging onto the arena of history. It revealed that the future would be keynoted by these socio-economic relations. We term these relations, new at that time, feudal relations.

The second of the major revolutionary turns of history was the collapse of the world we call medieval society. From the socio-economic standpoint it was generally a feudal world. There came a day when it collapsed as the dominant world system. Of the big countries, this happened first in Britain and France. It involved Britain in the 17th century, and France in the 18th. Developments showed that the socio-economic relations that had been taking shape little by little were next in the line of succession. We call these relations capitalist. The third revolutionary turn of world-wide impact occurred in the 20th century. It was heralded by the revolutions in Russia and China. These indicated the beginning of the fall of capitalism as the dominant world system. They indicated, too, that the future belonged to the new socio-economic relations that had begun to take shape in the environment of capitalist society. We call these relations socialist and, in so doing, consider socialism to be the first phase of communism.

If we turn to the history of social thought, we shall find there were people on the eve of each of these major turns who in some way foresaw the future, and even some of its specific features. In the epoch of feudalism, but on the threshold of the capitalist era, such men of philosophical-historical eminence as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) reflected on the future, that is, on the capitalist social order. Karl Marx identifed Hobbes with the thinkers who “began looking at the state with human eyes and inferred its laws from reason and experience, rather than theology.”¹ Of Rousseau’s theory Marx said that it was an anticipation of bourgeois society, ² which, at the time, was still of the future.

The works of Marx and Engels are one of the best examples of how the foremost thinkers of their time foresee the future on the threshold of revolutionary upheavals. Living in a capitalist environment on the eve of its collapse as a world system, they visualised clearly the features of the future socialist order.

However, the third of the big revolutionary turns had a different historical impact than the previous two. They occurred within the same general socio-historical framework, the framework of a class system in which class relations were marked by antagonism. One social system of antagonistic classes was replaced by another such system, in which the class antagonists were different. As for the so-

It leads not to the replacement of some classes by other classes, but to the elimination of classes and of the attendant social antagonisms. This is why socialist revolution is not just one more turn in the succession of previous ones; it is counterposed to them all. The collapse of slave-owning society and the transition to feudalism, and similarly the collapse of feudalism and the transition to capitalism, were transitions from one stage of man’s history to the next within one and the same social framework—the class system; whereas the collapse of capitalism and the transition to socialism is a transition to a new era, a fundamentally novel social system—to a classless society. This turn in history is comparable only to the transition of mankind from pre-class to class society.

This is why the present epoch offers greater opportunities than were available before, to comprehend the past and also the future—the latter, of course, within the limits of our visual range. Essentially, it has been under the impact of the latest revolutionary turn that we perceived the existence of classes as socio-economic entities, comprehended the substance of their interrelations and collisions, glimpsed the existence of a classless society in the remote past and its succession by a class society, and appreciated the fundamental difference between the ancient pre-class society and the classless society of the not-so-distant future.

Our knowledge of the past, coupled with what our own epoch reveals in relation to the past and future, enables us to comprehend the course of man’s history and, therefore, mould a philosophical conception of history. In doing so, we consider the history of all mankind, and not of any single group of nations or countries, buch concepts as “Europe”, “Asia” or “Africa” are geographic concepts rather than historical ones. At best, they belong under the head of historical geography. Such concepts as “East” and “West are also unreliable. At best, they stand for certain groups of peoples and even then connote different concepts to different nations at different times. The Chinese of antiquity and the Middle Ages, for example had their own idea of the “West”, implying those regions of the’ Asiatic continent later designated as Eastern Turkistan and Western Asia; to the modern Chinese the “West” stands for Europe and America. The ancient Romans, on the other hand, considered the “East” to be Syria, Palestine, Persia, Armenia and Mesopotamia; their descendants, the Italians of the Middle Ages, thought the “East” began at Byzantium, while today the Italians, and the

people of Western Europe generally, regard the “East” to be Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rumania, and, of course, the U.b.b.R. it is therefore impossible to base any concept of history on material limited to Europe or Asia, the West or the East. All mankind, precisely all of it, is the only valid material and constitutes the true subject of history.

This is borne out by the historical process we have described. Suffice it to say that two of the three afore-mentioned revolutionary turns of world-wide impact—from slavery to feudalism and from capitalism to socialism—occurred within a short space of time at different ends of the world: the first in the Han Empire, in the east of the Eurasian continent, and in the Roman Empire in the west; and the second in Russia, i. e., Europe, and in China, i. e., Asia. Even the emergence of the world capitalist system began in the 16th century at one end of the world, the Netherlands, and ended at the other, Japan, in the 19th century. It will also be recalled that the biggest peasant risings against feudal oppression, ushered in by the Peasant War in Germany in the 1620’s, swept across the whole world from France to Japan in the early half of the 17th century: 1620-1640, in France (culminating in the rising of the Va-nu-pieds in 1639); the first decade of the 17th century, in Russia (culminating in the rising of Bolotnikov in 1606-1607); the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, in Ottoman Turkey (the rising in 1600); the 1620’s, in Persia (the rising in 1629); 1620’s-1640’s, in China (culminating in Li Tzu-ch’eng’suprisingin 1639-1645); and 1620’s-1630’s, in Japan (the uprising in Shimahara in 1637-1638).

In may be added that the great peasant war in China was as big in scale and importance as the Peasant War in Germany, and only naturally so, for in the 16th and 17th centuries China was on a par with 16th-century Germany in historical development.

The common historical purport of these risings is revealed in an exhaustive investigation of the whole process. It bares the historic image of the risings as a kind of peasant “prologue” to the bourgeois revolution and shows conclusively why a generally identical political order, known as feudal absolutism, emerged, for all its local peculiarities, in the countries where these popular movements occurred. Could this have been grasped by studying the history of just one country?

We may refer to countless facts from various fields of human endeavour to substantiate the contention that a world-wide approach to history is necessary to comprehend the nature of historical development to the full degree. Take the movement that sprang up in Italy in the 14th century, subsequently known as the Renaissance. It was so named, because the new trends that appeared then in philosophy, literature and art were considered by contemporaries as a revival of the philosophy, literature and art that had existed in classical antiquity—in ancient Greece and Rome. We know all about this movement, but our appreciation of it will never be complete unless we consider the identical Renaissance that took place in China in the 8th century, the new features of which in philosophy and literature moulded the entire epoch. The Chinese, it is true, spoke not of a “revival of antiquity”, but of a “return to antiquity”; however, that is one and the same thing. The movement, its very content, essentially coincided with what we observe in 14th-

and 15th-century Italy, leading us to consider the Renaissance as a development which occurs necessarily at a certain stage in the history of medieval society among peoples with a long history, peoples

The history of the various fields of human knowledge, too, goes far beyond the limits of any one people. The very designation of such branches of mathematics as “arithmetic” and “algebra indicates the extensive participation of the Arabs in shaping these disciplines Yet we know how much the Arabs themselves owe in this particular field to the ancient Hellenes and Indians.

The history of logic reveals three lines of development the Chinese, Indian and European. The first (Hetu-vidya) goes back to Akshapada (2nd century A. D.), the second to Mo Ti (5th century B. C.) and the third to Aristotle (4fh century B. C.). The habitual, and seemingly European, concept of “vowels” and “consonants , and of •labial”, “lingual” and “dental” consonants, etc. was known to the Chinese back in the 8th century; yet they had learned

As we see, the facts showing that the history of mankind is the history of the whole of mankind and not of separate peoples and countries, and that the only way to comprehend the process of history is to study the history of all mankind, are numerous in all spheres. History is full of them. ,

However, this does not obviate the existence of particular histories, the histories of individual peoples. Every people big or small in number, has an individual history with its attendant original, unrepeatable features. We may go so far as to say that the history of mankind is manifested in the histories of individual peo-

¹ The history of mankind is not an anonymous process. It is highly specific and aggregates from the activities of individual peoples, each with their own distinctive face. Yet almost invariably the purport of historical events, rooted, it would seem, in the history of but one people, reveals itself in full only m the context of man s general history. The 16th-century revolution in the Netherlands, for example, is elucidated by the facts of Netherlands history. If we confine ourselves to just these facts, it will appear to us as a mere episode in the history of a fairly small country. Yet it shoulc be borne in mind that the Netherlands were then part of the Spanish Empire and acted as its financial, commercial even industrial, centre. It should be borne in mind, too, that revolution was followed by the Netherlands’ colonial expansion in the southern part ot Africa, some points of India and in Indonesia, and reached as tar as Japan. Besides, it should be borne in mind that the Dutch East India Company was the first instrument of the new capitalist colonialism, as distinct from the preceding feudalists Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. . ,

lands assumes the proportions of an event of world-wide historic impact. Perhaps it will even prompt historians to date the beginning of the capitalist stage in the history of mankind more properly to the Netherlands revolution.

Take this other example. The Russian Revolution of 1905 was above all an event in the history of the Russian people. Its origin, content, form and, lastly, its outcome were motivated by the course of Russian history. But once we recall that it was followed by the vast and important movement which Lenin described as the “awakening of Asia , it appears in an entirely different light as an event that transcends the framework of Russian history, giving us much more conclusive insight into its historical substance.

Every attempt to comprehend the process of history inevitably prompts the following question:

Does the process of history have any substance? Does it follow any purposeful direction?

One says there is no purport in history and that it is an endless repetition of one and the same thing. The other says there is purport in history and that history constitutes an unintermittent ascent. The theory of recurring cycles is the most striking exposition of the former view, and the theory of progress, of the latter.

Both these theories have been opposed. It is easy enough to criticise the theory of recurring cycles. There is any amount of facts to show that no epoch has ever repeated any of the previous ones, even though some of their features may have been similar. Nobody will ever insist that 19th-century European democracy was the same as the democracy of ancient Athens, or that the totalitarian 20th-century Fiihrerprinzip is the same as the Roman principate; that Racine’s Phedre is no more than an amended and revised version of Euripides s Hippolytus or that Michelangelo’s Moses is, generally speaking, the same thing as Phidias’s Zeus. It is true that Henri Matisse’s drawing resembles the still-life drawing of oranges, chrysanthemums and a jug by Shen Chou; yet the two are entirely different. The 15th-century Chinese artist strove to convey the essence of his objects in the aesthetic spirit of Ch an (Zan) Buddhism by reducing them to flat decorative forms with a few strokes of the brush, whereas the 19th-century French painter used the same technique to try and balance form and colour, an abstract problem that belonged entirely to the post-impressionist period of West European art.

The theory of progress, too, has had its critics at all times. The main argument against it was that the very concept of progress was dogmatic and unclear, or at least controversial. Its critics pointed out that the conception of progress depended on the point of view and demonstrated that facts considered progressive often proved

in the crucible of history to be anything but progressive. This criticism is, indeed, very weighty, because the question of what is progressive and what is not is often based on some abstract or dogmatic premise.

It seems to us that the most dependable way to settle this question, the basic in the comprehension of history, is to refer to history itself, to make an impartial analysis of the 6,000-year-old history of man.

We refer to the 6,000-year-old history of man, because the historic life of mankind within the scope of our vision, as recorded in writing, began some 4 millenniums B. C., when the first states appeared in two regions of the Old World—the Nile Valley and the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates. This does not mean that man’s previous life is set apart from history. However, our knowledge of it is based solely on historical anthropology and archeology, which makes it improper to speak of history in the precise sense in reference to that period. It does not follow, however, that this very long period of human existence has no historic sense. Its historic sense is tremendous.

Indeed, the appearance of states is inconceivable without a long preceding period of social progress and struggle. This progress was marked by the crucial fact that people began to create social forms. Engels pointed out most relevantly that the prehistoric times witnessed the most essential thing that conditioned the entire further course of human development: man became man. This epoch, Engels said, “has for its starting-point the moulding of man from the animal kingdom, and for its content the overcoming of obstacles such as w^Till never again confront associated mankind of the future.” ³

As we see, even this prehistoric epoch shows that from the very beginning human development was ascendant in complexion.

The era of history in the aforesaid sense began in the 4th millennium B. C., when Egypt emerged as a state in the valley of the Nile, and Sumer between the Euphrates and the Tigris. The distinctive feature of that era was that, unlike the phehistoric times when nearly the whole globe was the arena, historic life Avas associated with definite geographic regions. The Nile Valley and the basin of the Euphrates and Tigris were the first of these.

The further course of history ushered in a process of the steady expansion of the geographic and ethnic arenas of history; it embraced more and more peoples and countries. Even a cursory survey of man’s distant past reveals this distinctly.

The historic life of the first two centres—the Egyptian and Sumerian—was joined gradually by neighbouring regions.

The course of history spread southward from Egypt, one of the existing centres, towards the Ethiopian plateau, eastward towards the Arabian Peninsula, principally the contiguous part of it later

known as Palestine, and onward to the Mediterranean seaboard of Western Asia, the territory of what is now Syria and the Lebanon, towards Mesopotamia.

From the other centre, the Sumerian land in Mesopotamia, history spread out in two directions—towards Asia Minor, Syria, the Lebanon and Palestine, and towards the Transcaucasus and Iran.

By the middle of the 3rd millennium B. C., history involved a large territory embracing Egypt, part of Ethiopia, Palestine, Syria, the eastern part of Asia Minor, the south-western section of the Transcaucasus, some regions of Western Iran and Mesopotamia. From then on the process unfolded dually, with the above area expanding in the same directions as before, and a new big region—the seat of the Aegean civilisation along the Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor and including the islands of the Aegean Sea, Crete and the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula—being drawn into the vortex of history.

This is how a vast area of historic life, stretching across the contiguous parts of three continents and their adjacent territories, took shape by the middle of the 2nd millennium B. C.

Two more regions, interconnected by their histories, appeared in the 2nd millennium B. C.—one in India, the basin of the Indus and Ganges, and the other in the territory of what is now China, the basin of the Hwang Ho River.

The first Indian states appeared in the Indus and Ganges valleys in the 3rd millennium B. C., and the valley of the Hwang Ho became the seat of the Yin kingdom, the first Chinese state known to the historian, at about the same time.

Those were the first three geographic centres of man’s historic life, the first three foci of culture.

Subsequently, history maintained the same dual course, with each of the three existing historic entities expanding continuously, while new regions also became involved. The Euro-Afro-Asian world expanded towards Iran, the Transcaucasus and Asia Minor, and from the end of the 2nd millennium B. C. became the seat of the ' history of Assyria, the Neo-Babylonian kingdom with its centre in Mesopotamia; Media and Persia with the centre in Iran;' the kingdom of Urartu in the Armenian highland; the kingdom of the Hittites, Phrygia and Lydia in Asia Minor; Tyre, Sidon and other Phoenician city-states along the Mediterranean shore of Syria, Israel and Judea in Palestine; the Minean and Sabean kingdoms in South Arabia; Egypt and Ethiopia in the Nile Valley.

A new region, that of Western Turkistan, appeared some distance away in the 7th and 6th centuries B. C.’, represented by Khwa-rizm and Bactria. It was destined later to link the Euro-Afro-Asian, Indian and Chinese centres of historic life.

The Euro-Afro-Asian region expanded also towards the western Mediterranean. This occurred through Phoenician and, later, Greek

colonisation. Phoenician colonisation first involved the North African seaboard, chiefly the territory of what is now Tunisia, where the city of Carthage was founded in 814 B. C. to mark the inception of a new Phoenician centre, the state of Carthage, which grew into the then biggest colonial power with colonies in Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic Islands and Spain. This materialised in a new historic region connecting the lands of the eastern with those of the western Mediterranean. Merchant shipping, which the Phoenicians developed to a high degree, served as the vehicle of such a junction.

The Phoenicians navigated not only the eastern and western Mediterranean, but pressed on audaciously into then unknown regions of the globe. In the 7th century B. C. they circumnavigated Africa for the first time in man’s history, setting out from the Red Sea and returning through the Strait of Gibraltar, which they gave its first name, the Pillars of Melkart. Phoenician seafarers were also the first to reach the British Isles.

Greek colonisation proceeded in several directions. One was the western, with Greek colonies springing up in the south of Italy and in Sicily; the other was the north-eastern, with Greek colonies appearing along the northern seaboard of the Black Sea. The old territories of the Hellenic world developed as well. The earlier half of the 1st millennium B. C. witnessed the rise of Greek cities in Ionia, that is, the seaboard of Asia Minor. In the Balkan Peninsula civilisation expanded towards the centre, and other parts of the Peninsula were also drawninto historic life, the Thracian kingdom springing up in its north-eastern part in the 5th century B. C. and the Illyrian kingdom on the Adriatic shore in the 4th century B. C. The Kingdom of Macedonia appeared, too, somewhat north of Hellas proper.

In the meantime, a new centre of historic activity materialised gradually in the Apennine Peninsula. Etruscans were dominant in it at first, creating a union of cities in the 8th-6th centuries B. C. Later, precedence was seized by the Latins, who founded the city of Rome in Latium in 753 B. C. and formed a powerful state, known in history as the Roman Republic, in the 5th-4th centuries B. G.

The second old centre of historic life, that of India, expanded steadily as well. At first it involved new areas in the basin of the Ganges and Jumna. According to legend, there were 16 states in that part of the subcontinent by the beginning of the 4th century B. C. Subsequently, the central part of India south of the Ganges, was involved in the process of history. An old Indian kingdom, Ma-gadha, gained power in the north-eastern and central part of India in the 4th century B. C. The expansion continued. The Mau-rya Empire, which replaced Magadha in the 3rd century B. C., controlled almost the entire subscontinent, excepting its southern tip. As for South India, it made its entry into historical life in the 3rd century B. C.

contacted each other. From then, history witnessed their mutual relationship. This applies particularly to North-West India, which developed into the north-western outpost of the Indian world and at once the south-eastern outpost of Western Asia. Fora time, it was even part of Achaemenid Persia, later a part of Alexander’s Macedonian Empire. The history of North-West India was also associated with the Central Asian civilisation. At the time of the Kushana kingdom the two regions even joined within the framework of one state.

The third old centre of world history, the Chinese, expanded as well. During the 1st millennium B, C. general historic life in this part of the world spread from the Hwang Ho basin to the basin of the Yangtze, the other big river in China. Historic J territory also expanded north-eastward towards what later became Manchuria, north-westward towards future Mongolia, westward towards the present-day province of Szeclrwan, and south-eastward towards the future Viet-Nam. In the 3rd century B. C. all this vast territory became the Ch’in Empire, the first state to embrace all China.

A new seat of historic activity sprang up in Central Asia to the west of this third, continuously expanding, old centre. The principal makers of history there were the Huns. In the 3rd century B. C. they | formed an extensive tribal alliance, often described by historians as the Hunnish Power. It sprawled across vast territory from the * 1 Transbaikal in the north to Tibet in the south, and from Eastern Turkistan in the west to the middle reaches of the Hwang Ho in the east. This new centre was destined to act as the link between the East Asian centre of world history and the Central Asian.

By the end of the 1st millennium B. C. there thus took shape an immense region of the historic activity of peoples that were connected in one way or another. No longer were there just three centres, as in the earlier period of world history, but as many as seven. The three old centres—the Euro-Afro-Asian, Indian and Chinese—were augmented by the Carthaginian in North Africa, the Latin in southern Europe, the Central Asian and the Turkistan centre. History involved the bulk of Eastern Asia, a considerable portion of Turkistan, many regions of Central Asia, Iran, India, a large section of the Transcaucasus, Western Asia, the Nile Valley, some parts of the African Mediterranean coast, the Aegean island world, the Balkan Peninsula, the northern seaboard of the Black Sea, the Apennine Peninsula, Sicily, Spain and some parts of Southern France. 1

Development continued unabated, both through the expansion of the existing historic regions and the emergence of new ones. In the 2nd century B. C. the rise of the Roman state saw involved in historic life Numidia, a new section of the North African shore,

Spain in the 1st century B. C. and, somewhat later, Gaul and even Britain. This constituted the western periphery of the old Euro-Afro-Asian civilisation. The northern margin of the central part of

this civilisation, the northern seaboard of the Black Sea, developed historically as well. A Scythian kingdom sprang up there in the 4th-2nd centuries B. C. with its centre in the Crimea. The Kingdom of Bosporus arose on both sides of the Cimmerian Bosporus, now known as the Kerch Strait. Also, Colchis, Iberia and Albania—lands in the Caucasus and Transcaucasus—became lastingly involved in world history.

There was no such expansion on the eastern margin of the old Euro-Afro-Asian world, because it had long since reached its historic boundary, the limits of the Indian world. But the links and relations between the two neighbouring regions grew stronger and bigger. How great these contacts were is illustrated by the fact that from the 4th century B. C. the whole of this vast world developed into a single cultural and historic entity named the Hellenistic world, consisting of North-West India, Iran, Western Asia (comprising Bactria and Sogdiana), Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, the islands of the Aegean Sea and the Balkan Peninsula (comprising Greece and Macedonia). The influence of this world spread also to the countries of the western Mediterranean, notably Italy. It also exercised a tangible, though insufficiently established, influence on the Eastern Asian countries—China, Korea and even Japan.

The Indian lands expanded as well. Their expansion was oriented south and east. In the south, Ceylon, settled by emigrants from the Indian subcontinent, became involved in history from the 5th century B. C. The first Ceylonese states sprang up in the 3rd century B. C. Indian migrants also poured continuously into the islands of Indonesia, establishing relations between the Indonesian and Indian worlds. The heart of the Indonesian world was then in the territory consisting of the adjoining parts of the Malay Peninsula, eastern Sumatra and western Java. In the early centuries of the new era the first Indonesian states, which were largely India-nised, took shape there.

The Indonesian lands, too, expanded and, moreover, not only by involving the eastern regions of Indonesia in the operation of history, but also through the colonisation of distant Madagascar. The settlement there of migrants from Indonesia, who mixed with the local population, eventually formed the Malagasy people, ethnically close to the Indonesians.

The contacts between the Indian and the Indonesian worlds had far-reaching consequences. By way of India’s long-time relations with Iran and Asia Minor, which were seats of Hellenised culture, the Indonesian civilisation came into contact with the Euro-Afro-Asian world. The sea route from India to the harbours of Ja-vaka, a state founded in the 2nd and 1st centuries B. C. in the aforesaid territory, was also known to the Greeks.

The third old centre of history, the Chinese, kept growing too. By the end of the 2nd millennium B. C. it involved South Manchu-

na and the adjoining regions of North Korea. Three major tribal federations emerged in the Korean Peninsula in the 1st century f • ^G'T;^{the K}°guryo in the north, the Pakche in the south-west and the bilia in the south-east. For all the autonomy they had in their historic development, all these lands were part of the Chinese world. And from the 1st century B. C. onward, Japan, too, began to have close contacts with it.

The Chinese world also expanded in the south-eastern direction In the 3rd century B. C. the state of Nam-Viet took shape in the south of present-day China, which included the north-eastern part ot Indochina. In the 2nd century B. C. this kingdom fell under the sway of the Han Empire, and the connection between that part of Indochina and China has endured ever since. But in the meantime the historic life of the rest of the Indochinese Peninsula, inhabited by various tribes chiefly of the Tibeto-Burman group and by the Mon-Khmers, developed as well. In the 4th-lst centuries B. C they created their own states.

The Indochinese Peninsula was also a place of Indian immigration, which had the same consequences as in Indonesia: the India-nisation of many parts of the peninsula. Chinese influence came from the north-east, leading to the Sinification of some areas. Indochina, the name given to the peninsula, is thus justified not only geographically, but historically.

In the 1st century A.D. large lands stretching from the shores of the North and Baltic seas in the extreme west to the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan in the extreme east (with the entire European and Asian shore of the Arctic Ocean forming the northern margin and the territories adjoining the Bhine, the Danube, the northern Black Sea coast, the Caucasus in Europe, Western and Eastern Turkistan, the Gobi Desert and the Sayan Mountains in Asia forming the southern margiii), were still left out of the orbit of the “historic” world, populated by peoples interconnected in one way or another in their life. Continental Africa, reaching from Egypt and Ethiopia in the east and regions adjoining the Mediterranean up to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, lived a life of its own. There were also “blanks” within the liistorified lands, the biggest of these being the area of present-day Tibet, the Himalaya states and South-West China. The eastern section of the island world of Indonesia, too, was not yet drawn into common historic life. Farther on was Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, none of which had yet come into contact with the historified life of the rest of the world. The life of the Western Hemisphere, that of the Americas, proceeded in total isolation from the countries of the Old World. Its known, and evidently authentic, history came into being in relatively later times.

The further course of history’s spatial development is well known. The most prominent feature was the involvement in common historic life of new regions of Europe—the northern parts of

Western Europe and all of Eastern Europe. The western part of the northern half of Europe entered history after the establishment of the Frankish kingdom in the 5th century A.D; the central part in the 9th century, with the establishment of Germany; the Scandinavian part in the 8th century, with the rise of the Danish kingdom; the big territory embracing the basin of the Labe (Elbe), Odra (Oder) and Vistula rivers, with the establishment there of tribal alliances of Labe Slavs in the 6th-8th centuries; the lands of Bohemia. Moravia and Slovenia in the 6th-7th centuries, with the appearance of statehood there; Poland in the 7th-9th centuries, and the remoter section of Eastern Europe, with the emergence of the ancient Rus state.

Historified territory expanded also towards the Asian part of the Eurasian continent. This occurred from two directions—the aforementioned lands of the East Asian world and, much later, Eastern Europe. A tribal alliance of the Jujan emerged in the immense territory reaching from the Khingan Range to the Tien Shan in the late 4th and early 5th centuries. An alliance of Turkic tnbes, usually known as the Turkic Ivhaganate, took shape in the 6th century in the region of the Altai Mountains and Semirechye bordering on the old lands of Western Turkistan. This union embraced the lands of the Jujan, part of Central Asia and even some regions of North-East Asia to the shore of the Yellow Sea. In the other direction, the Turki spread towards Western Turkistan, invading the land between the Syr Darya and Amu Darya. Their raids reached as far as south-east of the Caspian Sea. The new historified territory came into contact with the Western Turkistan and East Asian lands, and with the zone which connected these two areas, stretching from Iran and Western Turkistan through Eastern Turkistan and further to the western frontiers of China.

The region of Manchuria and the basin of the Amur River became involved in the vortex of history somewhat later. The Pohai kingdom appeared there in the 8th century, consisting of various Manchu-Tungus tribes. This kingdom played a big part in extend-ting contacts between China, on the one hand, and Korea and Japan, on the other.

The emergence of the Mongolian Power in the early 13th century involved the vast territory reaching from the shores of the Sea of Japan, the Yellow, East China and South China seas to Western Turkistan and Iran, inclusive, and on through Eastern Europe to the Carpathians.

Later, historic connections began expanding in Asia from Eastern Europe. By the end of the 14tli century the Nogai Horde, moulded in the Volga country, laid claim to possessions on the Irtysh, and in the 15th century in the territory between the Tobol, Tura, Irtysh and Ob there rose the Khanate of Siberia, which involved Western Siberia in common historic life.

ed. In the 7th century a Tibetan state came into being, which expanded both towards West China and towards Western Turkis-tan. Nepal got involved in historic life too. A third route via Tibet and Nepal was thus added to the two old roads from the East Asian world—the one through Eastern and Western Turkistan, and the other through Burma and Assam. In the 8th century a state known in Chinese historiography as Nan-chao arose in the south-west of present-day China, adjoining Tibet on one side and Viet-Nam on the other. When the Arabs entered the stage of history and Arab expansion began in the 8th and 9th centuries, the historic curtain began to rise on Continental Africa. Arab traders penetrated far into the continent and Arab geographers produced their first accounts of the African countries and peoples. In Eastern Sudan, situated in the middle reaches of the Nile, historic life had begun in antiquity, at the time of Egypt’s bloom, but was isolated from the life of other countries. It was through the Arabs, who reached not only Eastern but also Western Sudan, where the states of Ghana, Songhai and Mali already existed, that the Sudan made contact with the outside world.

The eastern seaboard of Africa from the Somali Peninsula to Mozambique came into contact with the Arab countries as well. Arab cities, such as Malindi, were founded along the shore, with sea routes running to Aden and other points in South Arabia and from there to the Red Sea, to Ormuz and other harbours of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, and even to Calicut and other ports on the western shore of the Indian subcontinent. How well the Arabs had learned to navigate these routes is illustrated by Vasco da Gama’s famous voyage. Having skirted the then still unexplored parts of the south-eastern shore of Africa, Vasco da Gama reached Malindi and found himself in a civilised world. Malindi seafarers, he found, did not consider voyages to Calicut as anything out of the common. Strictly speaking, Vasco da Gama did not make the voyage to India himself; he was taken there by his Arab pilot, Ahmad ibn-Madjid.

In later days, the historic contacts of the peoples of Continental Africa with the rest of the world proceeded under the shadow of colonial conquests by the West European states. This was a form of contact which retarded the historic development of the African peoples. It was not until the middle of the 20th century, when the colonial system began to crumble, that the situation changed.

The history of the American peoples, too, was isolated from that of the Old World until the beginning of the Spanish colonial conquests. Historic life in America was centred chiefly in the territories of Mexico and Peru. As far as we know, the first people to form a state in Mexican territory were the Mayas. Their recorded history goes back to the 4th century. The history of Peru was associated with the Incas, whose tribal alliance dates to the 13th century.

The above survey shows graphically that the historical process has a geographic trend. From the earliest times, historic life expanded continuously until all parts of the globe suitable for human habitation finally entered general history.

The expansion was also unquestionably ethnical, for new sections of mankind kept emerging on the arena of history. It is easy to trace the manner in which this occurred. In some cases, new regions inhabited by peoples not yet drawn into the vortex of general history were added to the old regions. In other cases, new peoples came from places of their original habitation to invade old historic reo-ions. The history of the peoples of Japan, Korea, the Latins of Italy, the Celts of Gaul, etc., is an example of lnw nations were drawn into the historic life of their neighbours. Migrations may be illustrated by the settlement of Greek tribes in the Mycenean region, a part of one of the old historic regions at the end of the 3rd millennium B.C.; the settlement of the Arameans in Syria, Phoenicia, Babylon and northern Mesopotamia early in the 2nd millennium B.G.; the settlement of the Cimmerians in the Transcaucasus and Asia Minor in the 8th century B.C.; the settlement of the Hsien-pi, Hun, K’itan and Churchen tribes-in the north-east, north and north-west of present-day China, which began in the 4th century A.D.; the migration to the Balkans and farther to the southern half of Central and Western Europe of the Goths, Sarmatians and Slavs in the 4th century; the migration of Turkic tribes from the Altai to Turkistan, the steppes between the Aral and Caspian seas and the steppes of Eastern Europe, which began in the 6th century, their resettlement from Western Turkistan to Iran, Iraq and Asia Minor, involving the conquest of Azerbaijan and Armenia, which began in the 11th century; their advance to the Balkan Peninsula in the 14th century; the migration of Arabs to Palestine, Syria, Iran and Western Turkistan, on the one hand, and to Egypt and onwards along the Mediterranean coast of Africa, from where they came to Spain, on the other, which began in the 7tli century; the Arab penetration of East Africa; the settlement of the West Indies by the Spanish at the end of the 15th century, and then of Central and South America; and, lastly, the colonisation of North America by the Anglo-Saxons, Dutch and French in the 17th

These were all different migrations, occurring at different times, prompted by different motives, each of a different historic purport, and each bringing about different results. Often, the settlement of new lands w-as accompanied by the subjugation, sometimes even complete or near complete extermination, of the local populations. Let us take a few examples from modern history to illustrate this point: the Spanish completely exterminated the original population of the Caribbean islands; the Dutch exterminated the bulk of the Bushmen and Hottentots in South Africa; the population of Tasmania has almost completely disappeared, and a con-

siderable part of the Australian aborigines, and of the Indians of North America, have been wiped out.

Many of the migrations were like a chain reaction, the movement of one people causing the movement of another. The migration of the Cimmerians into Asia Minor, for example, was caused by the coming of the Scythians, who compelled the Cimmerians to abandon the places of their original habitation. The Scythians, for their part, had moved into Cimmerian territory due to the coming of the Massagetae. The march of the Huns, which began in the 1st century B.C. at the Wall of China and ended in the 5th century in the heart of Europe, displaced a large number of Central and Western Asian tribes, and then also the tribes of south-east Europe. In their movement from Central Asia eastward and westward, the Mongols swept along a prodigious number of tribes and peoples.

In these great migrations some tribes and peoples disappeared, while others grew strong. There were fusions of tribes, which modified the ethnic image of the more stable components or brought about the appearance of a new ethnic type. Hun, Hsien-pi, K’itan and Churchen invaders, for example, dissolved in the Chinese population. Yet they, too, influenced the anthropological type of the modern Chinese. The migration of Germanic tribes from Eastern to Central and Western Europe brought about a mixing of the newcomers and the previous inhabitants, which formed the nucleus of such modern West European nations as the English, French, Spanish, Italian and German.

This is how our planet was gradually populated and developed in the process of history, until the whole earth was at last populated and developed, save those parts of it which are unsuitable for human life. Ethnically stable tribal groups emerged in the complicated process of contact between the various parts of mankind. Peoples, which subsequently developed into nations, grew up. Language groups emerged, and individual languages were moulded within their framework. The social importance of languages changed: tribal languages developed into the languages of peoples, and the latter into the languages of nations. In this respect, as we see, the historic process was by no means chaotic; by and large, it followed a definite trend.

The historic process follows a distinctly definable trend also from the point of view of man’s activity, above all his economic activity.

Man has always confronted the problem of securing for himself the material conditions of existence. In remote antiquity man defined these conditions as “food-clothing-shelter”. The history of man’s economic activity, and with it the history of technology and material production, boils down to the provision of food, clothing and shelter in conformity with the geographic and social environment, the needs created by this environment and the tasks of further

development. To procure what he needed, man had to use the resources granted him by nature. Their use called for labour, which had to he progressively effective.The efficiency of labour, for its part, depended on two factors—the technical and the social.

The technical aspect of efficiency depended on the existence of instruments of labour, on their quality and on the degree to which man harnessed the forces of nature.This is graphically demonstrated by the process of history. We have the Stone Age, followed by the Metal Age, which broke into the Copper Age, the Bronze Age and the iron Age, which is the age mankind is living in to this day. Yet we already see the outlines of the Polymer Age. Some day, archeologists will probably refer to two great eras—the era of natural materials, those created by nature, and the era of artificial materials, those created by man. At the same time, we also witness man’s increasing mastery over the forces -of nature—the energies of fire, water, steam, electricity, electromagnetism and radioactivity. Man has made his first step towards mastering the energy of the atom, that is, the prime matter of nature, and even thermonuclear reactions, the energy of the cosmos.

However, the effectiveness of labour depends not only on the technical level. It also depends on the forms of organisation of labour, and the latter, in turn, are dependent on the prevailing social relations.

Real human existence originates when man begins to act in concert with his fellows. Such existence produces different forms of social relations— forms based on equal cooperation and forms based on the exploitation of man by man. The community is the oldest social form of the first type. By and large, the community has accompanied man in one form or another throughout his known history from primitive communism to the socialist epoch, with one set of functions or another, with different types of relations with other coexisting social forms, and with a different status in the general structure of society. The exploitation of man by man produced various forms of social relations, of which two are the most general: the one in which exploitation is effected by direct coercion and the other in which exploitation is effected by economic compulsion. A ithin each of these forms there are many varieties conditioned by the different relationships between the exploited and the means and instruments of production and, hence, their varying status in relation to the exploiters. The varieties recorded in man’s history are very numerous; some of them are distinct types, while others are transitional. There was slavery, dependence and freedom in many forms and of many degrees.

Slavery, dependence and freedom have also accompanied man throughout his history, often existing side by side not only among different groups of mankind at different social levels, but within one and the same group. Take Britain and France of the 17th and 18th centuries. They were the most advanced countries of their

time, but had feudal lords of nearly the medieval type, bourgeois who were much like the present-day capitalists, and slaveowners in their North American colonial possessions.

Social relations depend on the state of material production and the forms of economic activity, but they also affect both the forms of economic activity and the state of production. This dual process may be harmonious if the state of the productive forces and the social form are compatible, and disharmonious if they are not. As we know, when the incompatibility becomes acute, the existing social form is replaced by another, whereby the compatibility is restored for some time or, at least, the incompatibility becomes less acute. If we follow the process of history from this point of view, we shall see that forms involving non-economic compulsion were gradually eliminated, and forms based on economic compulsion took theif place. In the 20th century we are witness to the emergence of a form that is entirely free of every type of compulsion, being based on the equal cooperation of all members of society.

This trend reveals the ascendant course of the historic process. All social forms based on the exploitation of man by man involve the suffering of a vast majority of mankind. Yet they were not the making of an evil genius. They were moulded by history, by * the conditions in which man mastered the resources and forces of nature. At first, having only just learned to deal with nature, man had to substitute manpower for tools, or to depend chiefly on manpower as an appendage to available but inefficient tools. It was this that turned a large section of mankind into living tools, or slaves. After man’s labour was equipped with modern tools and man gained a high degree of mastery over the powerful forces of nature, the situation changed, paving the way for an entirely different kind of labour, one in which the antithesis between manual and mental labour is gradually eliminated and conditions are created in which man is able to shake off his abject dependence on the forces of nature in securing his material existence. But there was yet another meaning to this process: by means of the above social forms, coupled with an ever mounting degree of mastery over the forces of nature, man has continuously extended the scale of production; it transcended the needs of individuals or small groups of individuals and rose to a level that met the general social needs on an evergrowing scale, bursting state and national boundaries, in oui time there is the prospect of its becoming world-wide. At present material prerequisites have been attained to provide for the existence on earth of any number of people. What is necessary is to establish the due balance between the level of the productive forces and the social forms, that is, to establish a social order that would enable man to turn the existing premises into reality. We see that slavery in its historic form, and then serfdom too, disappeared in the process of history; we also see capitalist exploitation being replaced in the socialist environment by the free labour of harmoniously associated peo-

pie. This makes the above-mentioned outlook quite realistic. It is plain, therefore, that the historic process in this field pursues a definite trend and is, moreover, ascendant in character.

Most intensive cognitive activity develops along man’s historic' path. It accompanies man because his physical and social life demand it.

Cognitive activity is directed equally upon nature and society. Springing from man’s experience and continuously verified by experience, it tends to expand man’s knowledge of nature and society. Alongside this activity, man strives also to comprehend the outside world and himsef within this world.

Man’s efforts in this direction have assumed a variety of forms. In the remote past the Chinese interpreted the being of material nature and man as the operation of three forces: Heaven, Earth and Man. By “Heaven” they meant such phenomena as the succession of day and night, the four seasons, the climate and weather, and the atmospheric phenomena; by “Earth” they meant the soil, the plants and animals, the minerals, metals, etc. Man and bis abilities were placed on an equal footing with all this. That was the ancient Chinese conception of nature and man. The ancient Hebrews conceived man as the ultimate of all creation, as the ruler, the lord over all things placed at his disposal by the natural world. Many of the antique peoples had a third conception, that of man oppressed by the forces of nature, and capable of coping with them, let alone governing them, only with the help of an extraneous force.

Man’s apprehension of nature, of his place in it, of his relation to it, is a complex picture of development, modification and struggle between these three conceptions, in the course of which new arguments were found to substantiate them, new appreciations were moulded, and different combinations were evolved. But the sense of it all was one: there was the craving to find ways and means of gaining a greater degree of mastery over the resources and forces of nature in order to satisfy the continuously mounting needs. This purposive trend and the ascendant course of the historic process implicit in it are beyond question.

Man’s cognitive activity has also been focused on his social life. In the early half of the 1st millennium B. C. the ancient Chinese interpreted social life as the action of “five relations”—those of rulers and ruled, parents and children, husband and wife, elder and younger brothers and sisters, and friends and friends, that is, people who are not kin. The concept of what we call the family, society and the state is easily discerned in this formula. All other conceptions of social life have built on it, such as public and private, rights and obligations, compulsion and freedom, domination and submission, legality and lawlessness, justice and injustice, social good and evil, valour and crime, and the like. All this was differently understood, particularly as regards the degree of importance, even the need of

these principles to exist. The principle of archos, that is, law, as the symbol of the necessity of an organised order regulated by universally obligatory standards, was opposed by the principle of anarchos, or lawlessness, as a symbol of a social pattern free from all compulsion. Early in the new era the Roman poet Ovid conceived a society, which he called the “millennium”, in which men would without any judge, of their own free will, observe honesty and justice.

However differently these conceptions may have been understood and however bitterly they may have battled each other, their very appearance and the unceasing and persevering efforts of human thought to elucidate and substantiate them, to assert some and repudiate others, prove the ascendant course of man’s cognitive activity in the field under review.

Man’s cognitive activity directed at himself is just as distinctly revealed in history. “Know yourself” was said to have been inscribed over the entrance to the Delphic temple, articulating the need that confronted man in one form or another at a very early stage of his historic life. Strictly speaking, in its original form it was not a question that sought an answer; it was much more a kind of intrinsic conviction or, perhaps, a sense of self-perception. Consciously or not, man has always looked upon himself as, first, an intelligent being and, second, a social being. This self-perception stemmed from immediate experience and direct observation of himself and his fellows, and grew stronger as man’s experience and observations expanded. In short, man perceived himself as what biologists later defined as homo sapiens and, at once, as what Aristotle defined as zoon politicon.

Man’s notion of himself as an intelligent being came into evidence in his cognitive activity and creative endeavours. It combined in its development with efforts to explain the origin of reason, man’s distinctive attribute. The explanation boiled down to two conceptions, that of receiving and that of acquiring. In the first case, it was contended that man received his reason from a superior being, itself the personification and embodiment of reason, conceived usually as a deity. Christianity, for example, which maintains, after Judaism, that man is created by God after his own image and likeness, nevertheless described Christ’s birth as the inception of the “light of reason”. In the second case, it was believed that man acquired his reason through the very fact of his formation as a particular species among all other species.This notion was set out at its most distinct in the Buddhist teaching that all existence, man included, constitutes bunches of ■equivalent and inseparably connected threads that assume different individual shapes from which the threads stretch into the stream of being which has no beginning and no end. The ability to reason, it says, is but the feature which distinguishes the bunch of threads named man.Either notion is represented in history by a countless number of different variants expressed in myths, chronicles, legends, folk songs and in religious, philosophical and scientific concepts. The notion that man received his reason from a superior being was 226

interpreted in the story of Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus as an act of taking reason from a reluctant deity. Receiving reason from a superior being may also be interpreted as a natural act based on closeness to that being or, even, identity with it. This interpretation is given, among others, in the Judaist teaching about the creation of man in the image and likeness of God, and in the Indian Upani-shads, which argue the identity of God and man.It is also set out in a somewhat different form in the ancient Greek notion of gods being anthropomorphic creatures.

The conception that man acquired his reason independently may combine with the notion that reason is innate. The charvaka philosophy of the ancient Hindus, for example, considers reason to be a property of man’s physical being. A similar notion is set out in the Chung-yung, an ancient Chinese treatise, which attributes to man three qualities implicit in his very nature—reason, humanity and courage. These concepts are close to those that we designate as reason, emotion and will. The conception of the independent acquisition of reason may also combine with the notion of the development of reason by man in the process of practical experience, labour and struggle. If we look at this side of the history of man’s cognitive activity, we shall see the untiring work of human thought, employing the means of conceptual cognition, figurative apprehension and symbolical expression to produce what has eventually become an immense intellectual treasure.

Man’s cognitive activity w⁷as centred also on the most basic of all problems—the essence of the very process of life. This was by no means an abstract issue and stemmed from man’s activities. In its most general form, it boiled down to the following: does everything in a man’s life occur irrespective of his will and wishes, or does he himself chart his life’s road and his fate?

This question w^ras applied first to the fate of individuals, then to the life and fate of society, and then to the whole existing world. The answers furnished to this question w⁷ere different, but tw⁷o are the most typical and the oldest. The life and fate of the individual, society and the world as a w⁷hole proceeds irrespective of man’s will and wishes, says one; the life and faith of the individual and society is shaped by the people themselves, says the other. In the first case, the entity w'hich determined the path of the individual, the society and the world could be a being conceived either as a deity or as fate, or a powur conceived as a law operating independently of man’s will. In the second case, man was considered the maker of life and of the fate of man in society, the maker of the social law's.

There also exists a third answer, which, one may say, is the most widespread: the life and fate of the individual, of society and nature are governed by a certain force, hut man is able to influence this force by pleas, gifts, threats or the invocation of special powers able to subject even gods to man’s control. Or, to put it differently, the life of all existence obeys certain laws, but these laws are created by life

itself and man is able to comprehend them and control their operation within certain limits.

The history of religion and philosophy reveals a complex and motley agglomeration of these and other similar variants. However, the most common idea pervading all these views is the notion of two principles governing being. One of the most simple expressions of this notion are the images of Jehovah and Satan, or of Ormazd and Ahriman. This conception rests upon man’s observation in life of the useful and harmful, of the good and evil.The other expression of this notion, which is just as simple and similarly based on observation, is the image of the opposites—light and dark, hot and cold, hard and soft, old and young, male and female, etc. Take the ancient Chinese conception of duality, yang and yin, and the conception of opposites conceived by Greek thinkers and reflected in the teaching of Pythagoras. Among the ancient Greeks this conception was articulated in the symbolism of numbers, and among the ancient Chinese in the symbolism of lines, one principle being symbolised by an unbroken line and the other by a line divided in two.

This gave birth to the idea that forces of conjunction and division, integration and differentiation were operative in the world. A scheme of the motion of these two forces was drawn up in graphic symbols, showing the successively developing process of all possible combinations, transitions and changes. The Buddhists set out the regularities of the process of living in their karma, the principle of cause and effect, whereby every cause gave rise to an effect and the effect became a cause itself.

To sum up, whatever sphere of man’s cognitive activity we look into, history reveals the vast and persevering effort made by mankind to comprehend everything related to the individual, to society, to nature. New questions arose, the content of the old questions changed, the interpretations changed as well; different approaches were worked out to solve the question, but all in all a slow, contradictory but consistent process took place of expanding knowledge, finalising some of its aspects. We see knowledge serving the task that a people, or mankind as a whole, were confronted with. These tasks kept arising continuously, they became more complex, and cognitive activity absorbed all available experience and always, to one extent or another, was able to point out ways and means fulfilling them.

If we say that man is the maker of history, we must also say that history, in turn, is the maker of man. A social system established by man has the effect of forming man. Knowledge is worked out by man, but knowledge, in turn, forms man’s intellect. This is why man improves in the process of his historic life through his economic and social activities, which are alwrnys connected with his cognitive activity. His improvement occurs in two planes—as a creature of reason and as a social creature. There are many ways of defining "improvement” of man. One of the most ancient, produced by Chi-

nese thinkers, says that man cognises “things”, that is, the whole outside world, that he creates knowledge on the basis of his cognition, that knowledge makes his thought equal to truth and that the truth of thought conditions the “rightness of the heart”, that is, emotion. All this improves man’s personality, and when man’s personality, that is, he himself, is perfect, then the family is in good condition, and once the family is in good condition, the state is properly governed; once the state is properly governed, there is peace in the world. This conception is set out in an ancient treatise known as

The idea that it is possible and necessary for man to improve and that the state of society depends on the extent to which he has improved has accompanied man throughout his history. The ancient Chinese conception mentioned above maintains that the improvement of the personality begins through cognitive activity directed at "things”, that is, the objectively existing world. In other words, improvement begins through the action of reason based on experience.

The conviction that all man’s activities in improving his personality, and the social and political pattern, are aimed at one goal — the attainment of peace on earth, or among people, is just as important an element in this conception. The old adage of “peace on earth and good will among men” appeared at another time, among another people, within another system of conceptions, but it speaks of the same thing and is expressed precisely in relation to the “light of reason”. These and similar expressions, of which there is a prodigious number, reflect man’s age-old dream of truly human existence.

Man’s language is a strikingly bright and, moreover, a most immediate indication on mankind’s intellectual development. Cognition is effected through thinking, yet thinking assumes a definite, as it were “material”, form only when clothed in language. Language, Marx said, “is just as old as consciousness; language is the practical and actual consciousness, existing for other people and thereby also existing for me.”⁴ This is why thinking, its processes and its level of development, may be measured by the language.

We find certain wholes and parts of one form or another m any language. The linguistic act as the expression of the act of cognition consists in establishing connections between individual phenomena apprehended in a linguistic shell, or in determining the whole as a compound of individual parts.This act of integration and differentiation reveals the content of the objective world in which all phenomena are certain wholes, on the one hand, and compounds of indi\idu-al units, on the other. This shows that thinking as a function of reason is determined by being, which creates the opportunity for cognising reality. •

This function of language reveals the forms of such cognition. Reality may be apprehended in conceptual language or in a language

of images or symbols.Conceptual language is a tool of science; the language of images is that of imaginative literature; the language of symbols, that of myths. But this is so only when men imply so-called pure forms of thought in terms of concepts, images and symbols—forms that do not really exist. Imaginative literature cannot do without the language of concepts and symbols; a myth is inconceivable without images; as for symbols, they exist not only in imaginative literature, particularly poetry, but also in science, in which they assume their special form specific for the given branch of learning—a mathematical symbol, a chemical formula, and the like. All this speaks of the great variety of forms of thought, of the all-embracing character of man’s apprehension of reality, of the possibility to embrace it in all its fullness, that is, to penetrate into the essence of the cognised phenomena.

Language is also a means of communication. “Like consciousness,” Marx said, “language stems from the need, from the insistent necessity, of communicating with other people.”⁰ This function of language reveals the social nature of man. However, we should not take communication to mean the outer process alone; first and foremost, communication implies understanding. We are able to communicate by means of language for the sole reason that it contains categories and forms of thinking common to a given group of people and because the concepts, images and symbols concerned are clothed in expressions that have a common meaning for that given group of people.

Language is not only a means of communication and joint activity, but also a material expression of the intellectual communion of a given group of people. Small wonder that we considei language one of the key attributes of a nation—the highest form of all the integral social organisms yet shaped by mankind.

The history and reality of our time are marked by the existence of a great number of languages and, moreover, very different ones. This speaks of the fact that there are very many different ways in which man apprehends reality and very many different forms in which this apprehension can be linguistically clothed. At the same time, however, the historic process shows that these very different languages are steadily drawing closer to each other.

It is wrong to think that one language will ultimately come to replace the different languages. The obstacle to men s linguistic communication is not so much the difference of languages as such, but much more the difference in their semantic structure, that is, in the composition and number of concepts, images and symbols, the difference in their content and in the conditions and possibilities

It is essential in men’s communication with each other and. in their joint activity to understand what the other is saying, no matter what language this other may use. Yet such understanding depends on the identity or, at the very least, on the closeness of their intellect)

ctual levels. In the final analysis, it depends on their standard of culture and education. In the Hellenistic period the Romans and Greeks understood each other not only because very many of them knew both languages. It was easy for them to learn the other’s language, because both peoples had attained the same level of intellectual development and had one and the same culture. The Koreans and the Japanese of the Middle Ages understood the Chinese not only because they knew the Chinese language, but also because their mentality was largely shaped by the same factors as those which shaped the mentality'of the Chinese. Identity of the semantic system of the European languages during the Renaissance served as the foundation for the multilateral and effective development of international con-tftcts

The historic process shows that the languages of individual parts of mankind are steadily drawing closer to each other in this particular sense, while retaining and even developing their own distinctive features. This drawing together is the linguistic reflection of the expansion and strengthening of ties between peoples, of the exchange of knowledge, education and culture, which, in turn, is prompted by the continuously increasing necessity of international cooperation. .

One might say that in our time an immense section of mankind, at least its leading section, possesses a common language. By a common language we mean identity of semantic systems; the different forms of expressing it survive. This identity is maintained and developed through joint life and activity, a process which has at present involved the whole of mankind and all fields of science and culture.

The scale of this identity has brought about new phenomena, highly indicative as regards the trend of this process; we call them mass communication, that is, an almost limitless extension of linguistic communication within the framework of one languageIt stands to reason that this expansion was brought about by the insistent needs of social life with all its developments and all its contradictions. This need has given rise to such new means of linguistic communication, means adapted precisely for mass communication, as the radio, television, cinema and all other forms of audio-visual communication, a massive press and other forms of publication.

An entirely new^ form of communication has arisen as regards, different languages. It may be described as simultaneous multilingual communication effected through synchronised interpreting. Yet the very possibility of such communication appeared because people speak in different languages about one and the same thing. They may have different attitudes to what is being said, but the subjects involved are the same and the connections between them are comprehended identically. Mankind’s common language is based on mutual understanding in the direct linguistic sense, and development as well as struggle are impossible without such mutual understanding if the struggle is waged in the interest of development and pursues

Language is an instrument of development and struggle. This function of language is connected with the first, that is, cognitive, and also the second, communicative, element; they are associated with it because cognition and communication are effected through development and struggle. This function of language reveals man’s nature, that is, his emotions. Linguistics has long since determined that language has an expressive side; it expresses the speaker’s relation or attitude to what he is saying or his emotional reaction to what he hears. He does so by means of speech, intonation, tempo, modulation of the voice, etc. Alan uses these rich, complex and diverse means to express his emotions and attitudes towards the subject; emotions, that is, partiality, appraisal (statement of attitude) are just as essential for development and struggle in the defined sense as they are for cognition.

The state of human language and the practice of linguistic activity demonstrates beyond doubt in our time that the human personality generally, and the human intellect in particular, have scaled great heights. The history of languages examined in conjunction with the history of knowledge, of human relations and of society with all its institutions, indicates that the trend of the historic process, like all other aspects of man’s history, has been an ascendant one. .

In the time of his historic existence man has untiringly developed the land and resources at his disposal; he learned to control the forces of nature and to press them into his service. Thereby, he has been able to satisfy his needs, which kept growing continuously in quality, as well as quantity; he showed that it is possible for any number of people to live on earth. He discovered laws of nature and devised methods of turning them to his benefit; he created tools and methods of labour. All this demonstrated the possibility for a continuous extension of our knowledge of nature and for continuous technical

Just as untiringly, man laboured on the development of social forms consistent with the current big stage in his historic life, with each of the stages he achieved in technology and material production repealing forms suited to the receding stage and replacing them with new forms suited for the burgeoning period. He found the most desirable forms of organising social life, established norms to regulate relations between members of society, and apprehended the social requirements of individuals and society as a whole implicit in man’s social nature and growing more complex as mankind moves forward. He devised the necessary social institutions, demonstrating the possibility of a continuous growth of knowledge about society and man, and of developing on its basis such social forms and institutions as provide the right conditions for the unhampered existence of peo-

The ascendent course of mankind is no less distinct m the contiguous sphere of cognitive activity. The scope of empirically acquired knowledge expanded continuously, embracing not only what man found on the earth, but also what he saw in the cosmos. The development of empirical knowledge was accompanied by generalisat on, that is, by theoretical knowledge applying to the ever expand mg cognitive sphere. The development of the human intellect, wh occurred in this process, saw man create all sorts of aids ^{t0 fac}tate cognitive activity, such as instruments and ^aPPlia^nces an a variety of sciences, that is, systems of knowledge referring to the various fields of life. History has revealed immense possibilities tor

The various forms of cognition, coupled with the ways and means devised by man to satisfy the multifarious needs of individuals with their complex nature and of society as a whole, bear evidence of man’s continuous ascendant growth in historic life. These forms, such as science, religion, philosophy and the arts, which deal with words, musical sounds, colours and shapes, are all just as old as mankind itself. They were created by man, but they influence man himself. They owe their appearance in society to man; it is through man that they come into being, hut they acquire tlieir own being, turning into factors that act upon man’s way of life, on the lite of society and on every individual singly.

History demonstrates the continuous development and growing complexity of these creations of the human genius; it shows that their forms keep changing and that they have continuously greater importance in social affairs. Every newly invented tool is created by man on the strength of his experience and knowledge. However, once it is created it begins to influence its creator, moulding his labour and thought. It is human socie tliatty creates social forms, but once the latter are created they exercise an influence on the society that created them, shaping man’s consciousness in many ways and'impelling the further course of history. The same is true of science religion, philosophy, literature and the arts.

To be sure man’s ascendant advance has not been at all regular and unintermittent. There were epochs of stagnation, even of retrogression. Yet there were also epochs of particularly intensive pro gross. We know, too, that the general advance within a specific epoch has never been smooth: development marks some spheres ol social and intellectual life, while other spheres stagnate. However to appreciate the advance of history correctly from this point of view, we should bear in mind that the appraisals of their own epoch and past epochs by contemporaries may be coloured by their narrow conception of the historic process as a whole. Take the appraisals by the Italian Renaissance humanists of the Middle Ages, on the one hand, and of antiquity, on the other. Indeed, from the standpoint

of the tasks facing the Italian society, then the most advanced in Europe, society could not live by the old ideals, those of the times which the humanists called medieval, because that would mean stagnation.To break away from the existing state of affairs, it was necessary to substantiate such a move. Appraising the Middle Ages as a time of darkness and recession was just such substantiation.This appraisal, therefore, hinged on what was wanted for the present and future, and ignored what the Middle Ages had departed from at one time. Yet in defining the character of an epoch in history we ought to appraise every period from the standpoint of what it had yielded, what new element it had produced in relation to the preceding times, and to probe the nature of this new element—whether or not it has facilitated further progress.

The same caution should be exercised in dealing with appraisals which extol past eras as extraordinary times with which no other later times can compare. That is how the humanists treated Europe s antiquity: the history of ancient Greece and ancient Rome. To define our own attitude to them correctly, we should bear in mind that the authors of such paeans did not treat the epoch they thought ideal as one whole, but picked out the features in it that they thought most worthy of praise. We should also bear in mind that such appraisals of the past are, in effect, notions of the desired present and future, a retrospective projection of ideals focused essentially on the present. Such projections made it easier to visualise the desired in specific images. Antiquity was also worshipped in the bourgeois age, when the bourgeoisie still played a progressive role. In its efforts to create a democratic regime within the bourgeois framework, the bourgeoisie extolled Athenian democracy and the democracy of republican Rome. Need we say, however, that antique democracy was in its historic and social substance something entirely different from bourgeois democracy?

To sum up, we should certainly take note of existing appraisals, but chiefly in order to visualise more concretely what the society of the epoch wished and did not wish for itself, and what it considered progressive. The historic purport of every epoch is apprehended by comparison with what had gone before.and, at the same time, in the light of what had followed. Each epoch hinged on what its contemporaries wished for themselves, what they expected of the future, and what they saw in it. Taking all these reservations into consideration, we should—as we deal with the general course of history and not merely with separate periods of historic life—recognise that the course of history is ascendant, that mankind has continuously and steadily developed in all respects. All we need to settle now is whether this has been progress.

The answer depends entirely on what we consider to be progress. The substitution of firearms for bows and arrows, and of the automatic weapon for the flint gun speaks of technological development, and

moreover, of the development of all pertinent knowledge and science. Is that progress? The advance from face-to-face combat with equal risks for every man involved, to killing from afar, with one side in relative safety, is unquestionably associated with the development of science and technology. Is that progress too? The ability to massacre people wholesale is also unquestionably tied up with scientific and technical development, and of an immensely high order at that. Is that progress? We owe the substitution of electric charges for red-hot irons in the torture chambers to the discovery of electricity, an immense development made by science and technology. Does that, too, come under the head of progress? What about the suffering, the grief, the crimes and the man-hating that fill the chapters of human history from its very beginning to the present day, in various forms and on different scales? Are those evidence of progress? _ _

It is impossible to deny the existence of much of this not only in the past, but also in the present. Nearly all the things in history that may be described as positive, have something negative to counterweigh them. Many elements that are described as positive from one viewpoint, may be termed negative from another.

This is why we must determine what we mean by progress before we decide whether the course of history evidences progress.

To avoid falling into the error of dogmatism in attempting to answer this question, we should proceed from some point of departure — from the maker of history himself, from man and his nature, and, moreover, not nature as an abstraction, but concrete nature as it manifests itself in man’s historic activity. History attests that man is a sensible being, and a social one.This is why we may consider as progressive all elements in man’s historic activity which correspond to these principles in his nature and promote their increasingly fuller

All we should bear in mind is that these two principles are part of man’s nature not in isolation from each other, but in close association, and that the realisation of one is linked with the realisation of the other. We cannot consider as progressive the elements in which human reason alone manifests itself and which liberate man from all trammels, those that are conditioned by his own development as well as those which man and society create themselves. The activity of reason is truly progressive, provided it is coordinated with the social principle. .... ,

All elements which manifest the social principle in man s nature and facilitate the increasing development of the activity of man as the bearer of this principle may appear progressive. But such activity is progressive provided it is coordinated with the operation of

To be sure, this, too, is insufficient to define progress. Reason and sociability are no more than properties of one whole, of man; this means that they are governed by some general principle which characterises man precisely as a whole.

Man apprehended this principle a very long time ago. It was designated by different words and was differently understood at different times in history, but the substance of it was perceived equally at all times.

The Romans designated it in their language as humanitas. This was a derivative from the word homo, meaning “man” and connoting “humanity”, the “human principle”.

The ancient Chinese had the word jen, meaning “humanity”, “the human principle” and derived from another jen, which meant “man”.

This is how one and the same notion, “the human principle”, apprehended through one and the same concept of “man”, appeared quite independently, at two ends of the world, among two masses of mankind. The system of views and rules of behaviour based on this conception was named “humanism” by ourselves and jen-tao by the Chinese. These words are identical etymologically and in their real meaning. What did humanitas and jen mean in concrete terms? History furnishes the answer to this question.

In the middle of the 1st millennium B.C. Confucius, or those who spoke their ideas through the Chinese sage, described jen as “love for man”. At about the same time a conception expressed by the word naitryakaruna appeared in the Indian centre of man’s historic life, implying “compassion”. In substance, this is also “love for people” viewed from a different angle. Buddhism spread the principle of compassion among all the peoples of Eastern Turkistan and Eastern Asia. At the dawn of modern times, the commandment “love thy neighbour” was proclaimed by Jesus of Nazareth in Judea—in the third, West Asian, centre of history. Christianity spread it among the peoples of Europe.

Such was the conception of humanism in ancient times. Essentially, it has survived to our day.

But this conception did not ossify. Though its general purport has not changed, its volume expanded. What is still more important, the dominant trend did change. The contribution to the idea of humanity made by the Renaissance is particularly substantial.

The Renaissance, it appears, is not a possession solely of the history of the Italian people. It is not a “particular case” in man’s history. It is a stage in the history of ancient peoples who had had their period of antiquity and their Middle Ages. The Renaissance is a specific historic period between the early and the late Middle Ages, that is, one of the stages of feudalism. In the history of the Chinese people it seems to date to the 8th-15th centuries and to the 9th-13th centuries in the associated histories of the peoples of Iran, Central Asia and North-West India. In Italy’s history it dates to the 14th-16th centuries.

The historic facts on the eve of the Renaissance showed that social life and cultural progress could no longer advance along the principles created and worked out in the preceding epoch. These princi-

pies, as such, were not necessarily bad, but they had ossified and became a dogma, they fettered human thought. In China it was the Confucian dogma, in Western Asia it was the Muslim dogma, and in Italy it was Christianity. To advance, the fetters had to be cast off and the road had to be paved for free and creative thought. It is only natural that this urge was inspired by the notion of man’s selfsustained value. It was this notion that presented fertile soil for the development of the Renaissance brand of humanism.

Humanists in the different countries attached value to the human personality on different grounds. Quite naturally, their views depended on. their historic environment. The men of the Chinese Renaissance identified the value of the personality chiefly with man’s ability to improve himself. The humanists of Western Asia laid stress principally on the fact that man had lofty moral qualities, such as decency, generosity and the capacity for friendship. The men of the Italian Renaissance considered man chiefly as the bearer of reason, which they regarded as the supreme feature of humanitas.

We therefore have a criterion worked out by history itself to define the truly progressive. It is humanism in a two-fold context— as a designation of the specific properties of the human nature and as an appraisal of these properties in the sense of the supremely reasonable, and at the same time ethical, principle of human behaviour and social life as a whole.

In the light of this proposition one may look differently upon the gloomy side of history, the ocean of grief and suffering in which mankind has been immersed to this day. It is a truly great accomplishment, and probably the highest sign of progress, that people were able to see this fact, that they named evil evil, violence violence, and crime crime. After all, these words are not simply descriptions of acts or phenomena. They are an appraisal, a severe condemnation. Suffering has given them birth; they were born in the process of development and struggle.

It stands to reason that different meanings were attached to them. They have never been abstract.They were always specific, and their concreteness has always been historical. In class society, they were filled, like the concept of humanism, with a meaning designed to serve the interests of a certain class. They could have, and usually had, different meanings at one and the same time, for class society consists of antagonistic classes that have their own notion of what is socially evil and criminal. To be sure, at times the main evil coincided with what the class considered evil.This was so when the class was the most advanced social force of its time. But in class society, too, the finest sons of mankind, the bearers of its conscience, never deviated from their concept of good and evil as something applying equally to all. They applied the notion of good and evil to the sphere of the common interests of all men. Though it could not be realised in their epoch, this notion played a big part all the same, being the beacon along man ’s historic path.

The attitudinal nature of the concepts of evil, violence and crime prompted a sense of duty to combat them, the duty to remove evil from the life of man. Such a struggle has prevailed at all times and itself served as a tangible sign of progress.

Only naturally, the struggle was chiefly aimed against that which was considered the main evil at the time. This is why the immediate object of the struggle kept changing throughout history. In this sphere, progress came into evidence chiefly through the fact that the struggle was directed not only against the evil itself, but also against its causes.Progress came into evidence through the increasing ability to define the main source of evil in each specific case and to choose the most effective means of combating it.

What do we consider the main source of social evil in our historic time, when the development of the productive forces, of our knowledge, of our skill to harness the forces of nature, has led us up to a point v, here we can realistically consider the task of providing a material basis for a worthy life on the scale of all mankind?

What do we consider to be the chief source of evil in our time, when social progress has opened for us vistas of a classless society capable of providing a cultural and spiritual basis for a life worthy of man on the scale of all mankind in a community of harmoniously associated people?

To reply to the first question, we must take note of one specific feature of Our time—our relation to nature.

There were times—and they are not yet over—when man and nature were regarded as two forces opposed to each other. Their relationship was defined as struggle, as man’s eternal struggle against the forces of nature. Two opposite conceptions arose on this ground— the conception of man’s complete dependence on nature, and the conception of man the lord over nature.

However, there were also thinkers with a different turn of mind. They did not make man subject to nature. Neither did they oppose nature to man. They considered them as two forces coexisting in one and the same sphere, the sphere of life. What is more, they regarded them as forces that not only coexisted, but also interacted.

At present, man is about to master the most deeply hidden and greatest forces of nature. This has made him face up to a very pertinent question, the question of man himself. Who is he, the man who masters the forces of nature? What are his rights and what are his duties in relation to nature and to himself? Is there any limit to these rights? If so, what limit is it?

If we take humanism to be the great principle of human activity that has so far led man along the path of progress, it only remains to be said that our task today is to draw nature not simply into the sphere of human life, but into the sphere of humanism. In other words, we must humanise all the natural sciences. If we do not do so, our power over the forces of nature will become a curse, for it will emasculate man of his human principle.

The answer to the second question—what do we consider to be the main source of evil in social life —is clearly evident: exploitation of man hy man and the employment of w^Tar as a means of settling conflicts. The struggle to destroy such exploitation, to remove wars from history, is the main content of contemporary humanism.

Exploitation of man by man is no novelty in history. We are aware that it was inevitable at certain points of history, at a certain level of the productive forces. Resort to war was just as understandable. But we also understand that at the present level of the productive forces exploitation of man by man can he removed, and that at the present level of man’s intellectual and moral development exploitation, like war, is a crime. We owe this conviction to our humanism.

It is a credit to mankind that the conscience of its finest sons has never at any time accepted either the one or the other. Appeals for fraternity and peace resounded over and over again at all points of the earth. At first, these appeals came from the prophets, the sages, the teachers of mankind. Later, they came from the poets, the thinkers, the scientists. These men spoke on behalf of all, or, more precisely, it was through them that mankind, the ordinary people of the earth, spoke their mind.

Today, these ordinary people articulate their ideas themselves. Therein lies the great force of their appeals. This is why we, who carry on the struggle against the sources of social evil, a struggle waged for centuries by our predecessors, are likely to bring it to the cherished conclusion. Our social system, known as socialism, is incompatible in principle with either exploitation of man by man, or with war. That is the source of its great social force, a force that is quite special in substance.This is why it is within the socialist framework that we can realistically expect success in our struggle.

If so, have we not reason enough to look with hope upon our future? Admittedly, our future is not a direct and smooth ascent to a society that will provide mankind with a life worthy of man. No such thing has ever occurred in history. But the main path is clear. It is shown us by our realities. That makes us optimistic. However, to be certain in our optimism we need one more condition.

Humanism is, in social content, probably the most important of all the great ideas advanced by man in the many millenniums of his history. The idea of humanism springs from immense, profoundly perceived historic experience. It is the result of man’s having apprehended himself and his social tasks in the process of this exprience. The humanist idea is, socially speaking, also the highest ethical category. It has always been the supreme criterion of true human progress.

In a letter to Mehring, Engels described as absurd the charge that he and Marx refused to acknowledge that various ideological spheres, to which they allegedly denied an independent historical development, played a part in history. The basis of this notion, Engels wrote, is “the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregarding of interaction”.⁸

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